Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

Divjoy [0] is now profitable and my full-time thing. It did $50k in year one and my goal is to break $100k this year. It all started with a Show HN [1], so thank you HN :)

It was rough going at first, but I won the $15k YC Startup School grant [2], which let me jump into it full-time and give it my full focus. I managed to hit ramen profitable before having to go back to freelance.

The conventional wisdom is that devs won't pay for software (especially code!), but I've found it to be the opposite. There are a lot of employed software engineers who have disposable income and who are happy to pay for a dev tool if it means they can actually build and launch an idea in a weekend.

[0] https://divjoy.com

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044

[2] https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-the-startup-school-2...

paledot · 5 years ago

I just wanted to say that I really appreciate the decision to have the first steps of the project customization process not require registration let alone payment. It makes for a better sales pitch than a hundred landing pages.

makeee · 5 years ago

Thanks, that's great to hear! I'm not a fan of having to signup/pay to see how an app works either. Figured a tech audience would appreciate that.

sawirricardo · 5 years ago

Hi, I wonder what payment stack did you use? Is it only PayPal or do you use other, too? I'm thinking of integrating with PayPal API, too, but really didn't know the steps needed (not really friendly compared with Stripe)

makeee · 5 years ago

For Divjoy I'm using Stripe and PayPal (one-time payments). In terms of the code I give customers, I'm just doing Stripe subscription billing via the hosted Stripe Checkout page.

oceanghost · 5 years ago

I've been looking for something like this for ages. I have a small project I need to do and I'm not really a web developer. Muddling through setting all this stuff up for the first time would be far more work than the actual website.

How hard would it be for me to integrate with Authorize.net?

makeee · 5 years ago

I'd say that if you're interesting in learning to code then Divjoy may work for you. I try not to over sell it to non-devs, but I do have a fair amount of customers who are hacking at Divjoy projects while learning to code and are very happy with that.

Since all the boilerplate works out of the box you can skip over a bunch of stuff (like understanding how auth works under the hood), but generally there's some custom logic you need to write and you'll want to pickup some JS/React to do that.

Any integration with Authorize.net would be totally done by you. You could export a codebase with Stripe payments so that you can at least see how payments logic ties in with UI.. but you'd need to then strip that out and replace with your own custom Authorize integration.

hamza__nouali · 5 years ago

I also suggest using frontendor.com, it'll help you build a beautiful HTML interface for your website by copy-paste.

ryan-allen · 5 years ago

> There are a lot of employed software engineers who have disposable income and who are happy to pay for a dev tool if it means they can actually build and launch an idea in a weekend.

This is absolutely true, but companies also, or even devs working in companies will buy out of their own pocket to improve their productivity without having to ask the Accounts department, I know I have!

makeee · 5 years ago

That's a really good point! I may have a good number of those customers and not be aware of it. I need to do a better job of asking people what they're using Divjoy for.

codesternews · 5 years ago

Its amazing! thanks for sharing. Can you please tell from where you are getting the users? How you got your first users and what you are doing for marketing?

Thanks a lot.

makeee · 5 years ago

My first batch of alpha testers came from a single Twitter reply [0] that got retweeted by a prominent person in the React community. It certainly helped that I had an okay Twitter following at the time (I think around 1k), but it doesn't need to be huge. You just need the right person to retweet you.

That was enough to iterate on until I had an MVP.

Then my Show HN [1] sent like 15k visitors in a day and that led to a ton of usage. I think something like 4k projects were created that day. I wasn't yet charging at the point, but probably for the best, since high usage meant a lot of feedback.

A few months later I launched on Product Hunt and that went well [2]. Beyond that, just improving the product every day, sharing my progress on Twitter, and trying really hard to turn every new feature into an exciting launch event.

I also started a React hooks blog [3] that sends me a handful of customers every month. I could probably do a better job of promoting Divjoy on there.

Haven't delved into SEO (barely rank for anything), content marketing, paid advertising, etc, so it's still very much a learning process for me.

[0] https://twitter.com/gabe_ragland/status/1108875975494795265

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044

[2] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/divjoy-4

[3] https://usehooks.com

jonplackett · 5 years ago

Would be cool if you could add Plausible Analytics!

makeee · 5 years ago

I've been meaning to look into that. At the moment I'm using this library as the analytics abstraction: https://getanalytics.io. I'll see if the Plausible team wants to create a plugin or do that myself when I have time.

hurflmurfl · 5 years ago

Hi, wanted to let you know that when I click on "see pricing" on the banner in the top of the page, nothing happens. There's no way to find pricing at all, since there's no link at the bottom of the page either.

I'm using Firefox 68.11 for Android.

makeee · 5 years ago

Thanks for letting me know! If you scroll down below the "Choose your template" section do you see a pricing section with purple background? I'm wondering if the scroll to logic is broken or if that section is just not being displayed. If you wouldn't mind shooting an email to gabe.ragland@divjoy.com I'd love to follow-up about this.

I license a fully automated UV unwrapping tool at MinistryOfFlat.com . UV mapping is the task of unwrapping a 3D model to a flat surface in order to put textures on it. Ive been at it for about 3 years, and last year I made 7 figures. I do sell directly to 3D artists. You probably know some VFX companies and game companies that have licensed my tool.

I make a good amount from people coming to the web site, but the majority is made licensing the technology to various companies. The online sales are mostly there to spread the word, and gather user feedback.

UV mapping is a very difficult problem mostly because artist have very specific ideas of what constitutes good UV mapping and it doesn't conform to any simple heuristics. Its about a megabyte of C code without any dependencies, and that makes very attractive to licensees.

leetrout · 5 years ago

That’s really cool.

Do you worry about licensees keeping the code and using it without you knowing if they cancel? Or an employee at a licensee walking off with the code / binary etc?

We’ve talked about some of these risks at my current job which ships code as our product so curious how other people navigate this.

Congrats on the success!

quelsolaar · 5 years ago

Thanks!

First of all I sell perpetual licenses. For everything else I rely entirely on the honor system. I wont spend my time chasing some student who pirates a copy. The real money comes from the larger companies and they are terrified of getting in legal trouble for breaking any kind of license agreement, so they have no reason to screw me over.

I worry a lot more about making things complicated for licensees then I do about them taking advantage of me.

jituc · 5 years ago

That's really cool. I have really hard time calculating the prospect price for commercial usage of software. can you share the average commercial license pricing range for a product? and how much does it differ from pricing for individuals? Thanks for sharing your stats.

boulos · 5 years ago

Congrats! I’ve meant to ask you/Brent: what do you think holds ptex back in VFX and animation?

(For games, it’s clear that ptex is basically a nonstarter, since GPU texture mapping hardware can’t / won’t deal with it)

quelsolaar · 5 years ago

Lost of things. Lack of tools is one. Lack of hardware is another. Its incredibly useful to use 2D images as resources since there are so many tools, file formats and pipelines that support it. I have always seen Ptex as "UVs are hard, so lets reinvent everything to avoid solving that problem". Since I have solved the UV problem, there really isn't a need for Ptex.

abhinav22 · 5 years ago

Congrats! Sounds really amazing and great to see commercial success too!

tomcam · 5 years ago

I am in my 21st year of running a service that places bids the last few seconds on eBay. I am the sole employee and I outsource all of the heavy lifting. I have been doing the four hour work week since Tim Ferriss was in middle school. My house and farm in the Seattle area are both fully paid for. It allowed me to enjoy my children as they grew up and to afford serious medical bills (two of them are handicapped). It also allowed me to buy housing for several relatives, study constantly, and do a lot of pro bono work. It also allowed me to make some very expensive mistakes, but we were always careful enough not to do things that were fatal to our finances. It’s been an amazing set of experiences.

downandout · 5 years ago

That sounds awesome. What is the name of the service?

eSnipe.com

kristianp · 5 years ago

As someone who has sold something on Ebay and seen the last minute bid, the fact that shopping works really frustrates me. It's such a bad feature of Ebay that the auction end time is fixed regardless of bids.

I think you mean sniping, not shopping, and I can certainly see your point. Believe me, when I bought the business I carefully thought through the ethics. At this point it is unlikely eBay changes its policy because the pros and cons both are run surprisingly deep.

FWIW there were a few studies done on it in the early days of eBay, and it appears that sniping tends to bring more buyers to the table, even though sellers can feel uncomfortable with it.

mandeepj · 5 years ago

so, I can blame your service whenever I can't buy something via a bid at ebay for lower price

If you lost by 6 seconds (our default buffer and so the most common)... yeah. Sorry about those vintage Hot Wheels

khuknows · 5 years ago

https://pageflows.com has been paying my bills for a couple of years now

To give you an idea of revenue, it’s about as much as I’d be getting paid as a junior-mid developer in London and requires a day or two of work a week unless I’m adding a new feature, redesigning etc.

https://screenjar.com is also making a small amount of revenue, but nothing meaningful yet.

masa331 · 5 years ago

Screenjar looks very cool. Great idea! Bookmarking for later use

My former employer's support department uses TeamViewer with customers. A web-based equivalent would be a game changer for them, if you can go real-time.

abinaya_rl · 5 years ago

Thanks for sharing, screenjar looks interesting. I'll try it out in a few days.

Awesome, thanks - let me know if you have any questions or feedback

vinteruggla · 5 years ago

Brilliant. Are all those screenshots and videos made manually? Hard work

Yep - I've looked into automating or hiring this out, but spending Monday every week updating/adding a product has been the simplest solution so far

gnicholas · 5 years ago

I run BeeLine Reader, [1] which launched on HN years ago. [2]

BeeLine makes reading on screen easier and faster. At first, most of the revenue came from B2C mobile apps and browser plugins, but in 2020 it hit a tipping point and most of the revenue now comes from B2B technology licensing.

Blackboard recently adopted the BeeLine technology, and there are several other large education platforms that are planning to adopt in 2021.

Licensing revenue is uncommon for startups, but it's nice because it's very high margin. I actually used to be a lawyer, so I can keep the main licensing cost (legal fees) under control.

1: http://www.beelinereader.com

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784

andai · 5 years ago

Homepage looks a bit funky on iPhone SE (2016) https://i.imgur.com/QcaZVx8.png

I see this sometimes and then zooming out gives me the full view, but it's already zoomed out here.

Great idea btw!

update: Also checked on desktop, the site transfers 8.5MB and takes 13 seconds to load (the gradients). (My download speed is 7MB/s.)

Thanks for letting me know — I actually have an old SE lying around so will test this and see if we can get it to behave better.

fxtentacle · 5 years ago

What a brilliant idea :) Plus I like the name, it very nicely summarizes the product.

Glad you like it! Happy to send HNers a monthlong free pass — I'm nick@[domain].

ISL · 5 years ago

What makes licensing possible -- do you have a patent? Reimplementing by a competitor, at least at first blush, seems like it might be feasible?

Yeah, patents. But many licensees are also just happy to have use of our JS, and to be able to use the name. The name has decent recognition in assistive technology circles and is gaining traction in among university students as well.

lemming · 5 years ago

I develop Cursive - https://cursive-ide.com, a plugin for Clojure development in IntelliJ. I started working on it seriously in 2014, started selling it in 2015 after about 2 years in beta (during which time I had a daughter) and it has provided all my income since then. The sales are more than my salary + bonus (but less than total comp) at my last job at Google. This year is the first year that sales have dipped slightly, probably due to COVID and a better competitor for VS Code, but it's still very profitable.

sushpop · 5 years ago

Thank you for making. It makes learning and writing Clojure fun !!!

My pleasure, I'm glad you enjoy it!

damechen · 5 years ago

I solely started https://testimonial.to 2 weeks ago, and it generated over $5k revenue for me since its launch. I wouldn't say success, but at least it's my best launch ever.

Well, the website is an app to help collect video testimonials for your businesses. I offered a lifetime deal, all my revenue is from the lifetime deal. Now the deal is gone. In 2021, I will be only focus on recurring revenue. Start all over again :)

yroc92 · 5 years ago

Simple idea, love it. Well done.

Thank you! Yes, it's damn simple ;)

bluehatbrit · 5 years ago

May I ask what you did to promote it adn get that initial traffic?

Most of the traffic comes from Product Hunt and Twitter. I'd share my update very frequently in my tweets. Also, I will study who is my initial paying customer, so I get to know which industry has potential market, then I just go after/outreach those potential users in particular area.

kohanz · 5 years ago

Also: 9 months ago [0] and a few weeks ago [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22858035

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25442652

Thanks for adding.